A customer left a Bora One with me for service.
Since this is an early Bora One, the bearings use steel ball bearings instead of USB bearings.
There wasn't enough runout or centering issues to warrant removing the rim cement and pulling the tire, so I just did a hub overhaul.
Recent Campagnolo hubs have silver ball races even without CULT, but the black ball races and ceramic balls in the USB bearings that were used until recently have such different hardness between the race and balls that they tend to develop pitting more easily than steel ball bearings or CULT bearings.
So with my personal black One USB hubs, I'd deliberately swap them to steel ball bearings.
In Campagnolo's internal testing, in an environment where wheels aren't in a vacuum but are shielded from external air resistance, they spun wheels with steel ball, USB, and CULT configurations respectively, and reported rotation times of about 5 minutes, 8 minutes, and 45 minutes.
But at least with the black One, when you dial in everything including the grease, I don't see a significant practical difference between steel balls and USB.
With proper adjustment and normal use over time, the ball race develops clean wear lines from polishing rather than pitting, but until that happens, USB bearings have a very slight gritty contact feel.
Steel ball bearings, especially when nearly new, occasionally show that too, but generally they deliver a smooth rolling feel.
For that reason, steel balls aren't so bad, or rather, I don't think of them as a complete inferior version of USB in my book.
Since this is an early Bora One, the bearings use steel ball bearings instead of USB bearings.
There wasn't enough runout or centering issues to warrant removing the rim cement and pulling the tire, so I just did a hub overhaul.
Recent Campagnolo hubs have silver ball races even without CULT, but the black ball races and ceramic balls in the USB bearings that were used until recently have such different hardness between the race and balls that they tend to develop pitting more easily than steel ball bearings or CULT bearings.
So with my personal black One USB hubs, I'd deliberately swap them to steel ball bearings.
In Campagnolo's internal testing, in an environment where wheels aren't in a vacuum but are shielded from external air resistance, they spun wheels with steel ball, USB, and CULT configurations respectively, and reported rotation times of about 5 minutes, 8 minutes, and 45 minutes.
But at least with the black One, when you dial in everything including the grease, I don't see a significant practical difference between steel balls and USB.
With proper adjustment and normal use over time, the ball race develops clean wear lines from polishing rather than pitting, but until that happens, USB bearings have a very slight gritty contact feel.
Steel ball bearings, especially when nearly new, occasionally show that too, but generally they deliver a smooth rolling feel.
For that reason, steel balls aren't so bad, or rather, I don't think of them as a complete inferior version of USB in my book.